Volume 107, No 3, Autumn 2017

“How hard a word ‘understanding’ is to understand”, the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has observed. “The understanding between people supposedly referring to some shared foundations, or what might be underneath where we stand.” “Under every message / another message”, as Beverley Bie Brahic tells us overleaf. The word “palimpsest” appears three times in this issue. I remember first learning it at school when (briefly) studying Latin and I felt a soaring in my chest at the thought of all those sepia-toned scraps of parchment scribbled over indecipherably, one text on top of another. “We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom”, wrote Michael Ondaatje in The English Patient. “I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. […] We are communal histories, communal books.”
To write a poem is to make a new mark on top of all these old marks; even if the old marks aren’t visible, they’re there.

from Emily Berry’s Editorial

Poems

Beverley Bie Brahic, Palimpsest
Padraig Regan, Notes on Various Squashes
James Sutherland-Smith, Autumn Coming On, Snow
Ruth Wiggins, “It’s unclear why Miss Pasternak was in the forest…”Aria Aber, Fata Morgana, 1987, Rapture Series Read Aria’s ‘Behind the poem’ article on ‘Fata Morgana, 1987’
Lucy Mercer, In the Shadow of Young Girls in FlowerIshion Hutchinson, West Ride Out, Travel Axe
Terence John, Before Breakfast at Brush Lake, The Ramble: New York City
Matthew Sweeney, Google Maps, The Prayer, Nowhere Man, The Bone Rosary
Tony Roberts, Worms: A Love Poem
Amy Key, I wish I had invented the woman, Two Cats
Nansorhon / Ian Haight / T’ae-yong Ho, A Young Man’s Song, Small Lingering Joys, Part III, Remnants, Part I, Remnants, Part V
Eiffel Gao, from 24 Phases of Spring Flowers
Khadijah Queen, Something about the way I am made is not made, I wish I’d learned to take better care, Live unadorned
Niall Campbell, Clapping Game, First Illness
Matthew Caley, Meadow-saffrons
Marion Hobday, First Catch Your Hare
Tim Liardet, To the Mother as Event Horizon, To the Mother at The ElectricColette Bryce, Perfect Smile, Needles to Say Read Colette’s ‘Behind the poem’ article on ‘Perfect Smile’
Steve Ely, A great herd of swine, feeding, The countrey of the Gadarenes
Rebecca Tamás, from Witch
Astrid Alben, Happiness, Between the Lines